[losvedir]

Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

[tsimionescu]

This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.

[losvedir]

All the more reason people would prefer to work for a co-op, no? I really don't know why there aren't more co-ops, and am inferring they just don't work all that well. But if there are any regulations or something preventing them from succeeding, I'd love to know about it.

Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't really cross my mind.

[squibonpig]

If everyone has 40 hours a week + overtime and you have a coop that pays competitively for 24 hours a week and no overtime you won't get as much market share, can be outcompeted. It has to be done on a large scale, historically as a matter of policy. This was true for tons of different reductions in the workday and other labor rights improvements in the past.

[card_zero]

They can't strategize and adapt very quickly, because of all the cooperating.

[tsimionescu]

Co-ops face a massive financing struggle, as most money is owned by rich investors, not by working people. Imagine running a business that can basically only get money from bank loans.

In a much more equal society this would go away to a great extent, but we don't live in anything close to that. So, if any co-op finds some useful niche, it will easily be out-competed by some company taking billionaire investors. The only exceptions are fundamentally limited businesses, where billionaires don't care to invest to outcompete, or the rare situations where it happened to not go that way before the co-op grew large enough, such as Mondragon in Spain's Basque Country.

Beyond this, there is of course the problem of the chicken and the egg. There are vanishingly few co-ops, so there are very very few people who know how to successfully lead and manage a co-op. So, many co-ops will face internal organizational issues and fail, as often happens with any other type of org run by people with little experience. But this then perpetuates the cycle. The same thing happened in the regular business world - many historically common organizational practices seem absurdly bad from today's standards, but they took time to be understood and repaired.

And finally, especially in B2B scenarios, there are real biases that the corporate owner class has against this type of organization, both personal and structural. Lots of B2B deals are built on interpersonal relationships between the owners and executives of these companies, a world in which the elected leader of a worker's co-op would not have the financial means to participate, even if the deep classism of the corporate elite wouldn't keep them out either way.

[anonymars]

How did the 40-hour workweek come about?

(Certainly not "naturally")

[farnell]

Labor unions and henry ford

[bigiain]

Unions.

[baylisscg]

More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.

[antisthenes]

More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class.

E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment).

The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.

[throwaway-11-1]

Labor has been completely defeated in the US. Capital sets the terms and has captured the political class. You know this but are using deflection to put blame on individuals who don’t actually hold power. Management can offshore anytime workers present a challenge.

[azan_]

What are you talking about? Minimum wage has nowadays a lot wider coverage and many unions have absurd privileges and compensations (e.g. docking unions) for which entire society has to pay. Even recently NYC hotel keepers have managed to negotiate 6 figure salary. There's lots of doomerism that doesn't really hold up when confronted with actual evidence lately.

[jedimastert]

> it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

Because is advantageous for employers to keep workers as close to the brink of burnout as possible as a method of control

[xg15]

You can ask that question in the opposite way too: Why does the weekend still exist? Why aren't people working 24/7?